Psychologism

Psychologism is the artistic recreation of a personage's inner world — their thoughts, feelings, experiences, motives, and states of mind — in their depth, complexity, and dynamics. Psychologism is one of the most important achievements of literature, allowing one to 'look into' the human soul. One distinguishes direct psychologism (the immediate depiction of inner speech, self-analysis, the 'dialectics of the soul' — Nikolai Chernyshevsky's term for Tolstoy) and indirect psychologism (the disclosure of the inner through the outer — gestures, facial expressions, details, deeds). The means of psychologism are the inner monologue, free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, the psychological portrait and landscape, and dreams. The heights of psychological prose are the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy and the modernist 'stream of consciousness' of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In Ukrainian literature, a refined psychologism is characteristic of the novellas of Vasyl Stefanyk and the prose of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky.